KHH is Kimberly Hatch Harrison

I'm a former research biologist, and a former classroom teacher. Now I am the head writer and producer at Socratica - a company dedicated to making beautiful educational materials. Look for our videos on YouTube and our apps on the Google play store!

This is the FIRST EPISODE of our new series on How to Be a Great Student! In this episode, we learn about the CORNELL METHOD.

This is a great method for taking notes in class (or from your textbook, or watching a video). There’s no way to remember every word of a lecture. But taking great lecture notes is the first step to getting good grades and being a great student.

The most important rule is don’t write down every word. Listen carefully, then write simplified and abbreviated phrases that capture the main ideas.

When you get home, RE-READ your notes! Proofread them, making corrections as needed before you forget. Check your notes with a friend! In the margin, write brief headers that will cue your memory of each section of your notes.

Finally, write a summary at the bottom of the page so you can quickly tell what this page of notes is all about.

Do you have a different method of taking notes? Let us know what are your favourite study tips in the comments!

Many people use a large frame and suspend a camera overhead in order to do overhead shots. It’s one thing if you’re using a GoPro, but this isn’t something you really want to do with a larger camera with a nice lens. Other drawbacks include the amount of space an overhead frame takes up, and the fact that the camera is not easily accessible. You can’t zoom in during a shot unless you have a sophisticated remote control setup. You can’t easily move the camera from its fixed position, which limits the kind of filmmaking you can do (no pans, tilts, or slider shots).

Today on Socratica Backstage, you can watch how we mounted a large mirror in order to do better overhead shots. We immediately put it to use, filming B Roll and Insert shots for our first video in the Study Tips series, “How to Take Great Notes.”

We release our Backstage Videos early to our Patreon Supporters. Thank you for being our super-fans! Your support means so much to us.

If you are not yet a supporter of Socratica, please visit our Patreon Page and consider joining our team. You’ll be supporting our efforts to make more high-quality educational videos. Thank you!https://www.patreon.com/socratica

You hear a lot of advice as a small YouTube channel. Make more videos! Tweet every day! Shareability! Longer videos! Likes! Annotations! Ask them to Subscribe!

But the big piece of advice we never took was: COLLABORATE.

A rising tide lifts all ships, the saying goes, and the idea is that if your channel can help out another, you should do it. And don’t worry about contacting a channel with more subscribers than you – you could be bringing in a brand-new audience to the bigger channel. Everyone wins.

It’s easier said than done, of course. We’ve tried to pull of collaborations before, but something always got in the way: schedule conflicts, too big of a difference in style, lack of funds.

This time, everything went right, the stars aligned, and the fates smiled on us. We met Kat at an event at YouTube Space LA, and we recognized her from one of our favourite music videos – her cover of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” She’s a singer-songwriter from Japan and New Zealand, who makes “positive surf-pop” that will bring a smile to your face.

We knew we wanted to collaborate with Kat, but it was just a matter of finding a time and place to make it happen. Amazingly, we were both selected to take part in the YouTube NextUp program! This meant we were in the same place at the same time for an entire week, with beautiful filming studios and tons of equipment at our disposal.

SUCCESS!

We hope you enjoy the videos as much as we enjoyed making them.

Here’s the video about Musical Harmony we made for our channel:

And here’s the music video “Human” we made for Kat’s channel:

Remember to tell your friends about Socratica Studios, and encourage them to try our videos and subscribe!

A miracle occurred at Socratica Studios last month. Actually, it happened in Playa Vista, which is about an hour east of Socratica Studios.

Playa Vista is the location of YouTube Space LA (YTSLA). We spent an entire week there, because Socratica was chosen to be in the 2016 class of YouTube NextUp.

What is YouTube NextUp? It’s a program run by YouTube to identify and support promising up-and-coming YouTube channels. Hundreds of YouTube channels applied, and 16 of us were brought to YTSLA for an intensive week-long course in filmmaking and growing your channel. Each channel had an experienced mentor, and we worked all week with experts in the fields of cinematography, lighting, sound design, set design, greenscreen work, etc. etc.

It’s sort of like finding the golden ticket and being adopted by Willy Wonka.

Previous winners include ASAP Science (we’re big fans), Ingrid Nilsen, and Cassey Ho (who we actually got to meet and hear about her experience). So many of them are now well over a million subscribers. It really seems like this is a turning point for the channels in the program.

One of the best things about the NextUp was getting to meet and work with other YouTube creators. Working by yourself can be a kind of an echo-chamber, where you ask yourself, “Self, is this a good idea?” and you answer, “of course it is!” and you don’t question it. You always do things your way, in your comfort zone. Watching the other creators work and helping them with their shoots was an incredible education in how many ways you can go about getting great videos.

Our 2016 Class of YouTube NextUp:

Next time, I’ll include videos from my classmates and tell you more about their channels.

Remember to tell your friends about Socratica Studios, and encourage them to try our videos and subscribe!

I honestly can’t really remember not knowing how to read. My darling mum taught me, through a kind of osmosis, simply by reading to me incessantly from the time of my birth. She loved to read, so I loved to read. By the time I started school at around 2 1/2, I already knew how to read. “Ice Cream!” I read the announcement on the board to my teacher. (Friday was ice cream day at my preschool.) “Can you read that?” she asked, incredulous. Hey, there was ice cream on the line. This was no time for messing around with Play-doh.

Now that’s positive reinforcement.

We have made a new video for all the kids who need to learn this magic trick.

What are “Sight Words,” you ask? A fellow named Edward William Dolch compiled a list of words commonly found in children’s books. The list was prepared in 1936, and is still commonly used to this day. They are broken down into different levels, according to the grades in which children are expected to memorize these words.

Edward Dolch championed the “whole word” method of learning how to read. Many of the Dolch words can be sounded out phonetically, but recognizing these words can dramatically improve reading speed and comprehension. Between 50% and 75% of all words used in schoolbooks, library books, newspapers, and magazines are a part of the Dolch basic sight word vocabulary.[1]

This video covers all 40 of the Dolch Preschool Level Sight Words. Each word is pronounced, spelled, and used in a sentence. The pictures will help new readers remember each word. Please share it with your favourite new reader!

In the Great Hall of my public library were the words of Christopher Marlowe:

Infinite riches in a little room.

I truly felt like the world was at my fingertips when I went to that library as a child. I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up with the resources we now have. Just look at what I found online today:

If you really want to learn a subject, REALLY learn something in math or science, it’s going to take more than admiring an explosion or liking a photo of a fractal. It’s going to take more than 3 minutes of your time. It’s probably going to take some reading, and maybe even some equations.

Hermione read about it in “Hogwarts: A History.”

Socratica is not in the edutainment business. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for that: those channels are out there making videos that will make you think: “I f***ing love science!” – and that’s great, we need all the PR for math and science we can get.

But at Socratica, we sincerely want to be a resource for the brave few who want to put in the time to genuinely understand the subject. We want to take you on the deep dive. Are you ready to #LearnMore?

Like this:

All of us at Socratica grew up watching Carl Sagan and his groundbreaking series Cosmos. Most people think of it as a series on astronomy, but it was really more about our place in the universe as thinking, exploring creatures looking to understand who we are and how did we get here.

When I taught biology, I regularly showed Sagan’s episode about evolution as an introduction to the topic. My students would laugh about his pronunciation of “yooman” and his odd speech patterns with unexpected….PAUSES. But by the end of the episode, they were completely won over and wanted to see more of this fascinating man.

This line always got a big laugh.

Carl Sagan’s enthusiasm and broad knowledge of so many subjects made us want to learn almost everything from him. The work we do at Socratica is maybe best considered an homage to great teachers like Sagan. There’s no way we could ever capture his special sauce – but we do get inspiration from his candor, his love for teaching, and his quest to know.

Socrates is considered one of the founders of Western Philosophy, and the inventor of the Socratic Method which is still widely used in classrooms today. He’s something of a mystery, though, because what we know of him comes from second-hand accounts. What?! It’s true, the great teacher left behind no writings of his own.

Our hero and namesake is the star of our latest “Great Thinkers” video.

We recommend the following works from Socrates’ students, Plato and Xenophon: